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December 22, 2005
The Monstrance
by Arthur Machen
1914
 |
priest heaved up the Host there came a beam redder than any rose and
smote upon it, and then it was changed bodily into the shape and
fashion of a Child having his arms stretched forth, as he had been
nailed upon the Tree.--Old Romance.
So far things were going very well indeed. The night was thick and
black and cloudy, and the German force had come three-quarters of their
way or more without an alarm. There was no challenge from the English
lines; and indeed the English were being kept busy by a high shell-fire
on their front. This had been the German plan; and it was coming off
admirably. Nobody thought that there was any danger on the left; and so
the Prussians, writhing on their stomachs over the ploughed field, were
drawing nearer and nearer to the wood. Once there they could establish
themselves comfortably and securely during what remained of the night;
and at dawn the English left would be hopelessly enfiladed--and there
would be another of those movements which people who really understand
military matters call "readjustments of our line."
The noise made by the men creeping and crawling over the fields was
drowned by the cannonade, from the English side as well as the German.
On the English centre and right things were indeed very brisk; the big
guns were thundering and shrieking and roaring, the machine-guns were
keeping up the very devil's racket; the flares and illuminating shells
were as good as the Crystal Palace in the old days, as the soldiers
said to one another. All this had been thought of and thought out on
the other side. The German force was beautifully organised. The men who
crept nearer and nearer to the wood carried quite a number of machine
guns in bits on their backs; others of them had small bags full of
sand; yet others big bags that were empty. When the wood was reached
the sand from the small bags was to be emptied into the big bags; the
machine-gun parts were to be put together, the guns mounted behind the
sandbag redoubt, and then, as Major Von und Zu pleasantly observed,
"the English pigs shall to gehenna-fire quickly come."
The major was so well pleased with the way things had gone that he
permitted himself a very low and guttural chuckle; in another ten
minutes success would be assured. He half turned his head round to
whisper a caution about some detail of the sandbag business to the big
sergeant-major, Karl Heinz, who was crawling just behind him. At that
instant Karl Heinz leapt into the air with a scream that rent through
the night and through all the roaring of the artillery. He cried in a
terrible voice, "The Glory of the Lord!" and plunged and pitched
forward, stone dead. They said that his face as he stood up there and
cried aloud was as if it had been seen through a sheet of flame.
"They" were one or two out of the few who got back to the German lines.
Most of the Prussians stayed in the ploughed field. Karl Heinz's scream
had frozen the blood of the English soldiers, but it had also ruined
the major's plans. He and his men, caught all unready, clumsy with the
burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of them
returned. The rest of the force were attended to by an English burying
party. According to custom the dead men were searched before they were
buried, and some singular relies of the campaign were found upon them,
but nothing so singular as Karl Heinz's diary.
He had been keeping it for some time. It began with entries about
bread and sausage and the ordinary incidents of the trenches; here
and there Karl wrote about an old grandfather, and a big china pipe,
and pinewoods and roast goose. Then the diarist seemed to get fidgety
about his health. Thus:
April 17.--Annoyed for some days by murmuring sounds in my head. I
trust I shall not become deaf, like my departed uncle Christopher.
April 20.--The noise in my head grows worse; it is a humming sound.
It distracts me; twice I have failed to hear the captain and have
been reprimanded.
April 22.--So bad is my head that I go to see the doctor. He speaks
of tinnitus, and gives me an inhaling apparatus that shall reach, he
says, the middle ear.
April 25.--The apparatus is of no use. The sound is now become like
the booming of a great church bell. It reminds me of the bell at St.
Lambart on that terrible day of last August.
April 26.--I could swear that it is the bell of St. Lambart that I
hear all the time. They rang it as the procession came out of the
church.
The man's writing, at first firm enough, begins to straggle unevenly
over the page at this point. The entries show that he became convinced
that he heard the bell of St. Lambart's Church ringing, though (as he
knew better than most men) there had been no bell and no church at St.
Lambart's since the summer of 1914. There was no village either--the
whole place was a rubbish-heap.
Then the unfortunate Karl Heinz was beset with other troubles.
May 2.--I fear I am becoming ill. To-day Joseph Kleist, who is next
to me in the trench, asked me why I jerked my head to the right so
constantly. I told him to hold his tongue; but this shows that I am
noticed. I keep fancying that there is something white just beyond
the range of my sight on the right hand.
May 3.--This whiteness is now quite clear, and in front of me. All
this day it has slowly passed before me. I asked Joseph Kleist if he
saw a piece of newspaper just beyond the trench. He stared at me
solemnly--he is a stupid fool--and said, "There is no paper."
May 4.--It looks like a white robe. There was a strong smell of
incense to-day in the trench. No one seemed to notice it. There is
decidedly a white robe, and I think I can see feet, passing very
slowly before me at this moment while I write.
There is no space here for continuous extracts from Karl Heinz's diary.
But to condense with severity, it would seem that he slowly gathered
about himself a complete set of sensory hallucinations. First the
auditory hallucination of the sound of a bell, which the doctor called
tinnitus. Then a patch of white growing into a white robe, then the
smell of incense. At last he lived in two worlds. He saw his trench,
and the level before it, and the English lines; he talked with his
comrades and obeyed orders, though with a certain difficulty; but he
also heard the deep boom of St. Lambart's bell, and saw continually
advancing towards him a white procession of little children, led by a
boy who was swinging a censer. There is one extraordinary entry: "But
in August those children carried no lilies; now they have lilies in
their hands. Why should they have lilies?"
It is interesting to note the transition over the border line. After
May 2 there is no reference in the diary to bodily illness, with two
notable exceptions. Up to and including that date the sergeant knows
that he is suffering from illusions; after that he accepts his
hallucinations as actualities. The man who cannot see what he sees and
hear what he hears is a fool. So he writes: "I ask who is singing 'Ave
Maria Stella.' That blockhead Friedrich Schumacher raises his crest and
answers insolently that no one sings, since singing is strictly
forbidden for the present."
A few days before the disastrous night expedition the last figure in
the procession appeared to those sick eyes.
The old priest now comes in his golden robe, the two boys holding
each side of it. He is looking just as he did when he died, save
that when he walked in St. Lambart there was no shining round his
head. But this is illusion and contrary to reason, since no one has
a shining about his head. I must take some medicine.
Note here that Karl Heinz absolutely accepts the appearance of the
martyred priest of St. Lambart as actual, while he thinks that the halo
must be an illusion; and so he reverts again to his physical condition.
The priest held up both his hands, the diary states, "as if there were
something between them. But there is a sort of cloud or dimness over
this object, whatever it may be. My poor Aunt Kathie suffered much
from her eyes in her old age."
* * * * *
One can guess what the priest of St. Lambart carried in his hands when
he and the little children went out into the hot sunlight to implore
mercy, while the great resounding bell of St. Lambart boomed over the
plain. Karl Heinz knew what happened then; they said that it was he
who killed the old priest and helped to crucify the little child
against the church door. The baby was only three years old. He died
calling piteously for "mummy" and "daddy."
* * * * *
And those who will may guess what Karl Heinz saw when the mist cleared
from before the monstrance in the priest's hands. Then he shrieked and
died.
Posted by andrewanissi at December 22, 2005 03:54 AM